Poetry, placards, slogans, Instagram reels — the recent protests at Jantar Mantar against examination paper leaks saw it all. Alongside them came memes targeting the Prime Minister and the former Union Education Minister, many of them steeped in gendered and sexualised ridicule. While many defended the imagery as satire aimed at those in power, others questioned whether such language and symbolism merely reinforced the same sexist and transphobic hierarchies that progressive protests seek to dismantle.
The debate is not uniquely contemporary. For centuries, political protest has relied on the language of sexual humiliation, gender inversion and bodily degradation to strip rulers of their authority. From the American, French and Russian revolutions to India’s freedom movement, protests across history have repeatedly drawn on inherited social ideas about gender and sexuality to communicate political outrage.
The question, then, is not why protesters continue to use such imagery, but why it has remained one of the most enduring forms of dissent.
As tensions mounted between Britain and its North American colonies over taxation and imperial control in the years leading up to the American Revolution, political satire increasingly cast British rule as a form of sexual violation.
The image is not subtle, and was not meant to be. Nor was this only a male register.
The able doctor, or, America swallowing the bitter draught published in London Magazine, 1774 (Library of Congress)
Mercy Otis Warren, the most effective satirist among the Massachusetts patriots, published a series of verse dramas anonymously in the Massachusetts Spy and the Boston Gazette from 1772. Her villain, a thin disguise for the royal governor Thomas Hutchinson, is named Rapatio. The name is built on a pun on rape. He is the rapacious Bashaw of Upper Servia, around whom Warren arranged a cast of loyalists she skewered as depraved and mercenary. She was, simultaneously, an early and serious advocate of equality between the sexes.
The queen’s body: The French Revolution
The most thoroughly documented case comes from pre-revolutionary France, where historian Robert Darnton looked beyond the libraries of the philosophers to the world of what he called “Grub Street”.
The ‘High Enlightenment’ was the movement at its most respectable: its great philosophes, including Voltaire and d’Alembert, had been absorbed into the very establishment they had once needled. By the 1770s and 1780s, the Enlightenment had ceased to be a rebellion and had become an institution — a glittering world of salons and academies, royal pensions and honoured men of letters, increasingly at home among the elites of the Old Regime.
But beneath the sheen of its philosophers and salons was another world. ‘Grub Street’, a term borrowed from an 18th-century London street notorious for its impoverished writers, low-end publishers, cheap coffeehouses and brothels, had become a byword for the down-at-heel world of letters. Darnton used it to describe its counterpart in pre-revolutionary Paris: a mass of credentialed, ambitious young men who had come to the capital believing that the world of intellectuals ran on talent, only to discover that it ran on patronage.
Political cartoon during the French Revolution- Louis XVI Taking Leave of His Wife and Family (Wikimedia Commons)
They could not secure pensions or gain entry to the academies. They survived by spying for the police, peddling pornography and writing libelles — scurrilous pamphlets aimed at everyone above them.
Marie Antoinette was the principal target. She was accused of adultery, lesbianism and incest, and portrayed as the receptacle of every vice in France. Thirty thousand copies of a banned collection are thought to have circulated in the 1780s despite the authorities destroying as many as they could. The avalanche of defamation between 1789 and her execution has few parallels in the history of vilification.
What matters is the mechanism. The king’s rumoured sexual impotence was a transparent stand-in for political impotence – if he could not master his own wife and his own bedroom, how could he master France? The libellistes had no programme. They proposed no alternative constitution and offered no vision of what should replace the monarchy. What they did was strip the crown of its sanctity, one obscene anecdote at a time, until it could no longer be taken seriously.
The crucial point is that these were not ideologues. They were men who hated the system in their guts, and smut was the shape their hatred took.
The king on a leash: Bavaria, 1848
In 1848, King Ludwig I of Bavaria took as his mistress a dancer named Lola Montez, made her Countess of Landsfeld, and allowed her a degree of influence over the state that scandalised Munich. Students and townspeople took to the streets. The animosity focused on Montez, and when the March revolution arrived, she was, by most accounts, the final straw.
The visual register is a striking parallel to the language and imagery of today’s protests. One surviving caricature shows Montez crowned, a whip in her left hand, with King Ludwig attached to a leash and drawn as a dog standing on its hind legs. The sovereign was not merely criticised. He was domesticated, emasculated, and reduced to a household animal in a woman’s hands.
Political caricature of Lola Montez (Wikimedia Commons)
The humiliation was completed in life rather than in ink. On March 17, 1848, Ludwig was compelled to turn against Montez. Contemporaries record it as the worst humiliation of his life. He abdicated three days later.
The sacred house profaned: The Russian Revolution
Russia offers the closest modern parallel to Marie Antoinette, with the same mechanism operating at much greater speed.
From around 1916, pornographic material concerning Grigori Rasputin, the infamous advisor to Russia’s last royal family, and Empress Alexandra began to circulate. After the February Revolution of 1917, it became a flood. Pamphlets appeared with titles like ‘Royal Cupids’ and ‘Secret Adventures of Alice’. There was an “Akathist to Grishka Rasputin”, a pornographic parody of an Orthodox liturgical hymn.
Crowds seized on the material. Contemporaries complained that people talked little about politics and instead read about the amorous adventures of the tsars. Soldiers leafed through cheap brochures promising the secrets of the Tsarskoye Selo palace. Much of it was demonstrably fabricated. A “Rasputiniada” was staged and filmed within weeks of the monarchy’s collapse.
Historian Boris Kolonitskii has traced how a dynasty whose legitimacy rested on sacred purity was drained of its aura by exactly this material, not argued out of power, but laughed and leered out of it.
But 1917 also gives us the same weapon in women’s hands, aimed at the men holding the rifles.
During the February Revolution, women textile workers in the Vyborg district walked out on International Women’s Day and marched from factory to factory, throwing stones at windows, forcing their way inside, demanding that the men — the skilled metalworkers, the politically conscious ones — come out and join them. Then they went to the cordons.
The revolutionary Leon Trotsky’s account is the famous one: the women go up more boldly than the men, take hold of the rifles, beseech, almost command the soldiers to put down their bayonets. And the soldiers, he writes, are excited, ashamed, exchanging anxious glances, wavering – until the bayonets rise guiltily above the crowd, ashamed. Women invoking a code of masculine honour they had no stake in, and using it to crack the tsar’s most reliable force.
The bangle: Indian Independence Movement
Which brings us home, and much closer than a century of European examples might suggest.
On April 12, 1930, at the height of the Civil Disobedience Movement, JN Sahni, editor of the Hindustan Times, proposed in a National Week speech that the women of Delhi form a churi (bangle) league, modelled explicitly on Britain’s wartime White Feather League.
The next day, women, led by Satyavati Devi, went to the cloth markets of Chandni Chowk carrying a banner bearing the emblem of a bangle and the words ‘Bangles’ League,’ offering churis to defaulters wearing foreign cloth. The paper noted that nobody had yet dared accept the present.
The message was stated plainly: if a man did not have the courage to wear swadeshi, he had better put on the bangle and sit at home like a woman. Lucknow held a ‘Bracelet Day’ in December 1930, women moving from house to house, taking pledges and bangleing any man found in foreign cloth, passing deliberately through Hazratganj, the ‘forbidden area’.
Satyavati Devi, nicknamed the Joan of Arc of Delhi, led processions in defiance of Section 144 and drew crowds reportedly numbering 5,000 under the Chandni Chowk clock tower. She was jailed in 1931 and wrote songs from prison telling women to go into the fire of independence and to put their heads forward before the men.
It is tempting to read this as a straightforward slur: femininity as insult, cowardice as effeminacy. But Kelly Basner, who wrote an MA thesis titled A Glittering Arsenal: Bangles, Duty and Transgression in North India, argues that this reading is convenient shorthand and inadequate to explain why the tactic worked at all.
The bangle is the emblem of a wife’s duties – her marital obligations, her devotion, and her labour. To press one onto a man is to say: you have failed in your responsibilities, so perhaps you should take up hers. The threat underneath is one of role reversal.
The songs of the period make this unmistakable. Women are urged to hand their bangles to the menfolk, leave their veils behind, come out into the streets and bazaars, leave the making of chapatis to the men, and go out to make salt. In another, women give the men their bangles and take hathkadi (handcuffs) in exchange.
In 1857, a hundred sepoys were court-martialled in Meerut for their refusal to use newly-issued cartridges rumoured to be greased with cow and pig fat. Soldiers later testified that the women mocked and jeered at them, demanding their weapons so they could free the imprisoned sepoys themselves, telling them to stay indoors and put on bangles.
The revolt broke out the next morning. Placards outside Hyderabad’s chief mosque told the wavering Nizam that if he was fearful he should wear bangles and sit at home. A widowed queen of Oudh is recorded as bangleing each of her generals in turn.
Since 1930, the gesture has been performed on politicians, army generals, bureaucrats, police officers and even cricketers.
The Polish women’s strike of 2020-21
On a more contemporary note, in Poland, in October 2020, when the Constitutional Tribunal effectively banned abortion, the women’s strike took to the streets with a swear word used to tell someone to immediately go away: Wypierdalać – get the f*** out. Alongside it, Jebać PiS, and, exquisitely, a version mixing courtesy with filth: could you please f*** off.
Protest against abortion restriction in Kraków, October 2020 (Wikimedia Commons)
The vulgarity was deliberate and defended as such, a response to a government and a Church that, protesters argued, had shown women no respect. One organiser answered the inevitable critics directly: for misogynists, she said, the biggest problem is women using bad words. When two protesters were prosecuted for a Wypierdalać banner, a Polish judge acquitted them. Polite protest, she reasoned, would not have made sense.
The weight of what is available
Here, then, is the resolution to the apparent contradiction: progressive demands carried in regressive language.
Nobody invents a vocabulary of contempt from scratch. People imagine, argue, and insult within the world they have inherited. An insult works only if it draws on a hierarchy that is already living in the minds of everyone hearing it; that is what gives it its charge. Feminising a minister is insulting because femininity has been coded as degradation for centuries. This is not a defect peculiar to Gen Z, India, or this particular movement. It is the condition of speaking at all.
The libellistes reached for the queen’s body because sexual purity was where the monarchy’s sanctity lived. The Vyborg women reached for masculine honour because that was the lever attached to the soldiers standing before them. The Bangle League reached for the churi because everyone in Chandni Chowk already knew what it meant.
The inherited weight of social imagination is never a single, coherent thing. The language available to protesters, across time, has been shaped by the social hierarchies of their time, a mix of ancient prejudice sitting beside genuine moral insight, superstition beside rational judgement, the worst of what a society has believed jumbled up with the best.
History shows that within that mess, there is a rough, unpolished good sense that speaks through the noise. Ordinary people never arrived at a protest already purified of their inheritance. The crowd will always reach for what is nearest to hand. What can change is what we leave lying there.
The author is a doctoral scholar at the Department of Historical Studies, Central European University.
For centuries, political protest has relied on the language of sexual humiliation, gender inversion and bodily degradation to strip rulers of their authority. (Photo edited by Abhishek Mitra) 
The able doctor, or, America swallowing the bitter draught published in London Magazine, 1774 (Library of Congress)
Political cartoon during the French Revolution- Louis XVI Taking Leave of His Wife and Family (Wikimedia Commons)
Political caricature of Lola Montez (Wikimedia Commons)
Protest against abortion restriction in Kraków, October 2020 (Wikimedia Commons)
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